“How do your people get into the cargo hold?” asked Chinyama.
“With the captain’s permission, they travel through the crawl space under the hangar decking until they’re underneath the shuttle, then cut through the decking and the shuttle’s bottom hull.”
“Deck plates can be replaced,” Pan said distractedly. “But it’ll make noise. And smell.”
“Smell, no. You can lower the air pressure in the crawl space to pull the cutting fumes away from the shuttle. The Tacticals will be wearing filters to evade the fumes, by the way. Noise, there won’t be much of, but I agree there’ll be a little. We’ll need a distraction to cover it.”
“What then? We pump anesthetic gas into the shuttle?”
“You carry anesthetic gas onboard?”
“No.”
“Then no.”
“My crew can manufacture something in a half hour. Or Envoy Buoun’s faction can send their own mix across. I’m sure they have something like that.”
“I have heard we do,” Buoun said, glad to contribute something.
But Fowler was shaking his head. “With due respect, there are so many things that can go wrong with that. The gas puts down the weaker occupants of the passenger area but not the stronger. Or the gas is somehow toxic to Humans, meaning we lose Wepps and Lukic.”
“Fair points.”
“I have considerable experience with this. If we try gas or sonics or microwaves, we risk the health of the hostages without guaranteeing sufficient damage to the hostage-takers. This situation requires a simple and old-fashioned methodology: surprise, shock, and accurate close-quarters combat. Our best option.”
Pan nodded, glancing at the two Xerxian soldiers waiting silently. “Very well. I trust your judgment and your people. I’m sure you’re keen to get on with it. Anything else I need to know?”
“I don’t think so,” Fowler said, following the Captain’s gaze. “Tacticals Hecate and Jogianto have volunteered to board the ship. I’ll need assistance from your surviving Peacekeepers and medical staff in the aftermath. But if I have your approval, I can work with Commander Chinyama on details.”
“I’ll leave you to it.” Pan moved to the door. As it opened, he swept an arm toward the passage beyond. “Envoy Buoun, if you please.”
The statement seemed truncated, but Buoun understood the gesture. He preceded the Captain outside. When they were walking along the passage, Assured crew members standing aside to let them pass, Pan said to him, “I give you the choice, sir. You may join me on the bridge to monitor proceedings from there. Or I can find you an escort to Ambassador Gregory’s yacht where you may be safer if your enemies have put a bomb on that damned shuttle.”
“But … is the ambassador’s yacht not in the hangar?”
“We moved it outside Assured.”
By the time they had reached the elevator, Buoun had made his decision. “I will stay with you, Captain. I would like to attempt the bravery I see among your crew in the face of this danger.”
He thought the Human’s nod was one of approval—or perhaps that was wishful thinking. Pan said nothing as the elevator opened and he waved Buoun inside. He said nothing all the way to the next level, or along the passageway to the bridge elevator.
In fact, the senior Human ship commander said nothing until they were on the bridge and he was barking for an update from the various stations there.
As he leaned against the bridge railing, Buoun noticed there was no longer a soldier on “watch” duty as was the Human tradition. All of the soldiers left alive on Assured were either hostages or doing something to get those hostages back.
Ana and Hecate stood in an access passage outside the hangar bay, pulling on combat e-suits. Ever since she’d first been fitted for one at age seventeen, Ana had always felt weird getting into them. The mesh-armor woven into the fabric of these Xerxian models always made it seem like she was slipping inside a deboned corpse.
Manolo had positioned herself over by the hatch to the hangar. Umbrano and Chipper were out in the hangar itself, lying prone on cargo cages with their rifles trained on the Tluaan shuttle’s hatches. A few paces from where Ana stood, Fowler wrestled a deck plate up and off its mounting, sliding the thing sideways and grimacing at what she imagined was stale and oily air wafting from the exposed crawl space. Well, with her helmet on, she wouldn’t have to smell that.
By Fowler’s feet sat two small datapads, controllers for the thumb-sized roachbots currently perched on his right shoulder. With a precise kick, he sent one datapad skidding across the floor to Manolo who ducked down for it. Crouching, Fowler powered up two light-sticks and tossed them along and under the deck. He plucked the roachbots from his shoulder and tossed them after the light-sticks. With the second datapad in his hand, he rose and waited while Ana and Hecate locked on helmets and loaded equipment into their torso pouches.
The Confeds were allowing the use of Xerxian-issue ballistic sidearms for this mission. It felt damn good to have her TK7 back. Ana clipped the eight-load 12-mm automatic into the holster resting across her left breast. There was no danger of a stray round piercing a bulkhead and causing atmosphere loss, even with the tungsten carbide rounds the pistol packed. Assured itself was built sturdy—and she and Hecate would be firing within the Tluaan shuttle, a contained and armored vessel within the larger ship.
Breathing plastic-smelling suit air, she holstered a second TK7 below the first. Beside her, Hecate did the same, the extra weapons borrowed from Umbrano and Manolo. Without the larger magazine-capacity of a rifle, Fowler had reasoned it was faster to drop a depleted pistol and draw a new one than to get caught reloading. That was fine with Ana. She didn’t mind carrying a backup shooter anyway. Jams still happened, even with the best maintained ballistic weapons.
“Ready to kick more warrior ass?” Hecate asked her.
“You know it.” She moved to the hole in the floor. Several people said it would feel like swimming down there, because the captain had cut off gravity in the crawl space, making movement less strenuous. She looked to Hecate. “Higher rank goes first?”
“You’re closer.”
She put her weight on her hands and swung her legs inside. The transition from standard-G to zero did feel a little like entering water. A little. She pushed down until her boots met the far side of the duct and coiled against the “floor” before launching away in the direction of the hangar bay. It was cold down here, her suit telltales said—also dark, because the crawl space lacked its own lighting. Fowler’s light-sticks drifted end-over-end ahead of her, creating a flare of yellow light that showed the roachbots scuttling along the floor. Although the walls were traced with cable housing and junction boxes, there was plenty of room. There were, she knew, more ducts on either side of this one and even below it, all compartmentalized to hinder environmental contaminations or breaches and many of them tighter than this one. The term “crawl space” was a dumb one for this duct: it was high and wide enough that even Umbrano and Chipper could pass through here if they had to, side by side even.
Passing the light-sticks, scattering them, she flicked on her suit’s chest lamp, then grabbed a strip of cable housing on the floor and pulled on it, increasing her speed. She ducked her head to glance back. The open decking behind her formed a block of brightness, a solid white beam abruptly blocked and broken by Hecate’s entrance.
Ana reached to the side and pulled at the cable housing, accelerating further. The two bots reached the end of the duct ahead of her and scrambled through the open accessway into the next. With knees curled to her stomach, she latched onto the hatch frame with one hand and swung herself around to the right inside the cross duct.
Her telltales said that air was flowing here. The Assured crew had created their pressure differential, set to snatch away the smoke of the cutting tools. When she and Hecate had left the briefing room, the “distraction” meant to cover their breaching activities hadn’t yet been decided on. Damn well hope they’ve decided now
, she thought. We’ll be cuttin’ in a minute. It took her another five seconds to reach the next junction, another open hatch in the side of the duct.
With Hecate close on her heels, she took hold of the hatch frame, then climbed through into another long and boring stretch lit only by her chest lamp. Again, she kicked off. She found and depressed the tiny bump on her left wrist that triggered her retinaid. A moment later, the tiny window opened up in the top right corner of her vision, blank except for a countdown of meters and centimeters. As the countdown approached zero, Ana grabbed at a conduit housing to bring her to a stop, resting beneath a square panel. Her retinaid outlined the panel in a soft green. In the periphery of her vision, two small shapes shifted from a wall to the ceiling, the roachbots keeping out of the way.
“Fireteam in place,” she told whoever was tapped into her comms. It was expected that she give this verbal confirmation, but it was total double-up. The colonel had allowed her retinaid to feed direct to Assured’s sensor stations, so Pan and the rest of them knew exactly where she was, and what she was looking at.
As Hecate drew in beside her, Ana drew the laser cutter from her largest torso pouch. Hecate drew a similar-sized device from hers, what Xerxians called a CDM—a cuchara de mierda, or crap collector. When the droplets of superheated metal started floating around down here, the CDM would prevent them from settling and cooling on their faceplates.
“Swap,” Ana said. “This time, it’s you first.” As they traded implements, she asked whoever was on-channel, “How’s that distraction coming?”
A moment’s pause, then her colonel’s voice: “Hold a moment, fireteam.”
“Copy, holding.” She and Hecate were shoulder to shoulder, their faces lit softly within their helmets, enough for Ana to make out the other woman’s expression. Looked like Hecate had the same thought she did, like, We’re doing our jobs. Why can’t they?
Waiting, Ana thought. Goddamn waiting. Nothin’ worse.
Fowler’s voice crackled in her helmet. “Okay, fireteam, you’re good.”
No hint of what the distraction might be; Ana only hoped it would work.
Firing up the laser, Hecate began tracing an angry orange line along the inside of the deck panel’s frame. Her movements were steady and sure—and fast. She paused now and again for Ana to use the CDM to vacuum away yellow specks of burning metal as they drifted into the duct’s airflow. Fumes formed a dirty mist that would have obscured their vision if the airflow wasn’t pulling it away and over their shoulders. Once two sides of the square were complete, Hecate powered off the laser and shook out the hand that had controlled it, keeping it limber. They swapped tools and Ana continued the job with Hecate capturing the beads of superheated steel that wept from the cuts. When the square was complete, Ana unpowered and lowered the cutter. Hecate took out the other tool she’d carried in, the thing some wise ass had simply labeled a “grabber,” an extendable handle with a magnet on the end.
She pushed the handle out to about half a meter and latched the magnet onto the red-limned panel above them, which sat there only because there was no gravity to drop it out. In her comms, Ana heard the woman’s relieved sigh when the plate came loose easily. She vacuumed away a few stray fragments of floating debris while Hecate uncoupled the magnet and sent the heavy plate sailing down the empty duct away from them.
“We’re through the first section,” Hecate commed, although this would be obvious to all watching their retinaid feeds.
The wounds made by the first round of lasering were scabbing over already. Hecate’s helmet bumped Ana’s as they surveyed the patch of shuttle hull visible in their lamplight. It showed considerable laser scoring where the beam had broken through the Assured deck plate. Ana’s turn to sigh in relief. Whatever that ship was made from, it wasn’t resistant to lasers.
“Now comes the hard part,” Hecate commed.
“Every part’s the hard part,” Ana sent back.
Hecate edged around to the opposite side of the hole and watched as Ana readied the cutter. They’d each have to do the bit they could see from their side, keeping their heads and hands out of the way. She said, “Just don’t point that thing my way.”
“Yeah? Well, same goes when it’s your turn, all right?”
“Enough,” Fowler snapped at them. “Keep it moving.”
“Copy,” Hecate replied as Ana restarted the laser.
Ana’s retinaid had mercifully gone dark, its incoming feed cut by Fowler so she could see clearly as she cut the new lines. Once again, droplets of hot metal leaked in the wake of the laser’s beam, pulled down with the smoke for Hecate to pick away with the CDM.
This second round of cutting was slower going. The shuttle hull was thicker and hardier than the hangar deck plate had been. A little over halfway around, Ana paused to exchange tools one last time. While Hecate finished the job, she commed, “Almost there, Colonel. Are we good to continue?”
“Distraction continues up here. No sign they’re aware of you.”
“Copy.”
When the new plate finally separated, Ana used the grabber to tease it out then down into the crawl space before settling it and the attached grabber to the floor. She cut her suit lamp. Above them, dim light filtered down from the small compartment. The lower luggage hold lay below the passenger deck, but Hecate still had her 12-mil out and aimed up the stunted tunnel they’d created, just in case someone had come snooping. No one had.
Ana took an aerosol can from another torso pouch before giving Hecate the signal to lift her up. Hecate took hold of her right leg and moved her halfway up the breach tunnel, before holding her in place. Wherever the hull material still glowed or smoked, Ana sprayed a sealing gel to cool it.
As if that gel was affecting her too, a cool calm settled over Ana. Battle readiness. Abandon. Acceptance. There was no more time for thought, for doubt, for worry. Only action.
When she flipped the can to Hecate, her colleague batted it out of the way. Ana drew her 12-mil then grabbed the lip of the breach tunnel, pulled her head above it and confirmed the compartment was empty. Empty of people, empty of cargo. A rectangular area one and a half meters high, stretching all the way across the shuttle, festooned with luggage straps for securing cargo.
Now this is a crawl space.
She’d come up halfway across it. Holstering her weapon, she used a nearby strap to help her climb inside. Once more the sensation of returning to standard gravity was a little like pulling herself out of pond or pool. A number of small red globes fitted to the bulkheads allowed her to keep her lamp off. She crawled aft to the handle for a cover piece that could be opened to store larger items, or to allow maintenance crew to move between the upper and lower cargo areas. A flare of light announced Hecate’s arrival before her partner cut her suit lamp and climbed on in.
Ana told her comms, “In ship,” then unlocked her helmet and took it off. Blocking her natural senses, the thing would only be a hindrance now. Placing the helmet beside her, she drew the 12-mil again and pulled at the handle. Concertina-like, the cover piece folded up and against the aft bulkhead, creating a two-by-two-meter gap.
Something scuffed against her boot, the roachbots catching her up. They moved up the bulkhead and into the compartment above. Her retinaid feed came online, vision from a bot. This one would keep transmitting; the other would play a different part, operating as a mobile flash-boom grenade. As seen by the bot’s cam, the next compartment was roomier—they’d be able to stand upright—and the light was stronger, yellow rather than red. There were doorways at either end of the connecting wall to the passenger compartment, both closed. The doors had ring-handles, simple hold-and-twist designs. The room contained nothing but a couple of big water containers held in place by straps at the back—and one person.
The person was slumped against the portside bulkhead, head on the floor. One arm stretched limply in front of them. The other … The other was half gone.
Vazak!
While Heca
te ditched her helmet, Ana climbed on up. The area smelled like Tluaanto, that faint body odor Ana could never really find anything to compare to. Someone had slapped a careless dressing over the stump of Vazak’s arm. Blood caked it but appeared to have stopped flowing. Ana was about to feel for a neck pulse when the warrior’s chest rose and fell in a shallow breath. Unconscious, but alive.
Time to help her later.
She moved to the portside door. Both roachbots raced across to join her, clinging to the connecting wall above her head. When Hecate had climbed up, Ana cracked her door just enough for the bots to pass through. The broadcasting one went high, the other low. Hecate took a knee before the starboard door, her weapon aimed at it. The broadcasting bot stopped on the wall outside, its camera sweeping.
On her retinaid, Ana saw that the people out there could not have been arranged more perfectly. Forward of the seat rows, close by the sealed portside exit hatch, both warriors had their heads bent over a datapad. Councillor Suran lolled on the front row of seats. Mingatat was absent, no doubt behind the sealed cockpit door. The hostages sat on the floor in the portside aisleway, backs to the bulkhead. Pi was furthest away from Ana’s position, closest to the warriors, then it was Vren, Naat and Wepps. Closest to Ana’s door, Master-at-Arms Lukic sprawled, her eyes open, fixed, unblinking. Ana suspected she’d died from organ trauma suffered in the initial altercation. Wepps looked awake, however, his arms on his knees, his chin on his arms. The three councillors appeared uninjured but subdued. Through the wall, she heard the burble of the warriors’ voices; perhaps they were discussing the distraction outside. They were certainly distracted.
A few days earlier, Ana had heard an Assured crewer use the phrase, Like shooting fish in a barrel. Now she understood what they meant.
Across from her, Hecate was seeing the same thing in her retinaid. She gave Ana a wink and a nod. Silently pulling the door closed, Ana put her chin to her suit’s collar where the comms mic was set, and murmured, “Scratch the flash-boom. Repeat: no flash-boom. Going in on three. One, two ...”
Assured (Envoys Book 2) Page 7
